A generation ago, bomb scares called in to public schools did not make news.

Newsroom wisdom was that the threats were most often the work of misguided students. Reporting the calls, which seldom resulted in evacuations or even much of a police response, would only encourage more threats. Advised by police and school officials, editors and reporters worked under the assumption that students who called in threats enjoyed seeing their handiwork in the newspaper.

So as we continue to cover what seems like a rash of social media threats to county schools, we wrestle with the consequences of our work. Should we report these events at all, or put them in the category of not-news?

Here is why we will continue to report these threats.

Columbine. Sandy Hook. The Amish school at West Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.

Deadly violence at American schools goes all the way back to the founding of our country and beyond. But it seems like a horribly modern problem. It is the worst thing imaginable for parents of schoolchildren.

County schools, police and parents take these threats far more seriously than they did a generation ago, and so must we.

We can, however, keep social media threats by students that are unrelated to real violence in perspective. Discredited threats on Twitter probably should not make the front page, but they should be reported so the public knows they've been discredited.

Discredited warnings on Instagram about a student's plans to shoot up a school are not a front-page story. The police and school investigation and the community reaction should be a prominent story.

Discredited threats to target African-American students in two schools should be a news story because of the police response, which not only includes an investigation to find the culprits but also enhanced presence at schools.

I mention the front page here, but realize it is an increasingly irrelevant distinction in measuring the importance of a news story. The news we report is increasingly consumed on our website, and people come to it more and more though search engines and social media tools.

It doesn't matter if we place a story about one of these incidents on the front page of our print editions, or the home page of capitalgazette.com. Readers find it because they search for news about their school or their community, and the stories are shared, tweeted, emailed and re-posted.

News is viral.

We know from police that students charged in some of the recent social media threats read our stories about their actions. It might not be part of the motivation — one student who made one of these threats recently told police she did it because it seemed funny — but it clearly is part of the experience.

So to those students, I want to be clear that we are not slaves to the actions of misguided youth. The amount of detail in our stories should be commensurate with the seriousness of both the threat and, more importantly, the response.

There also is more others can do to prevent these cruel hoaxes.

School officials need to do a better job of making clear that there will be consequences for students behind these pranks. Are students suspended and, if so, for how long? Are they expelled?

Police and prosecutors need to examine the laws and determine whether students over 16 who make these threats should be charged as adults. That would lead to the release of their names, a type of attention that might not be as welcome or seem as funny.

While I believe minors who commit crimes should have the benefit of anonymity to help them move past mistakes that adults might not make, there are exceptions in which making an example of someone might serve the greater good.

This might be one of those exceptions.

Rick Hutzell is the editor of Capital Gazette Communications. Contact him at rhutzell@capgaznews.com and follow him on Twitter @HutzellRick.